


Monocular Diplopia

by Smaragdina



Category: Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Gen, Identity Issues, Imprisonment, Memory Loss, Mental Institutions, Non-Consensual Electroconvulsive Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 07:54:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1337854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"When he looks at the eye it does not look back. The lenses will not focus. It lies in his palm like a dead thing." Garrett was asleep for a year, but not in the usual sense of the word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Monocular Diplopia

**Author's Note:**

> Monocular diplopia: double vision in one eye
> 
> Many thanks to sparkedsynapse and 3parts (both on tumblr) - to the former for the initial concept, and to the latter for uploading all the documents from Chapter 5 for reference, as I was way too much of a chicken to go back through and find every single one myself.

He wakes up one year after the accident.

He wakes up six days after the accident.

Time is a tricky thing.

*****

There are signs posted everywhere on the walls of Moira Asylum, rules and regulations, notes from doctor to doctor, warnings, mottos. In the summer, when the windows are open so that the salt-heavy air can blow inside and remind the patients of words like ‘sunlight’ and ‘sea,’ the wind strikes up a great fluttering of paper on the walls. The sound of a great library, pages turning and turning and turning, back and forward and back again.

Moira Asylum _remembers._

Patient #18 arrives in a flurry, doctors snapping to attention at the _click-clack_ of the Baron’s cane on the floors. Patient #31 arrives much more quietly. _Quiet_ seems to follow in his shadow. When Nurse Aubermill writes the intake notes, the tip of her pen makes no noise at all upon the paper.

 _Received patient #31,_ she writes, as sun sets and lengthens the long shadows in the halls. _Admitted by the state and delivered under guard. Patron was tight-lipped and oddly uncaring, but grudgingly proposed that he be used in #18’s therapy; apparently the two have a history. Muttered something about “just in case.” Requested that no intake paperwork be filled out for him. Apparently admitting him here is a miscarriage of justice._

_I wonder what makes #18 so important._

_I wonder if #31 is truly sick._

_If there’s anything I’ve learned about this place, it’s not to ask._

She burns the note.

She does not ask.

*****

Garrett wakes up six days after the accident to a white room and blinding-white lights and white clothes instead of familiar black leather, fresh white bandages over his hands and elsewhere where he’d scraped skin open in landing on the ceremony-room floor. For a moment, or an hour, or a day, he does not move. He can’t. Not _truly,_ not well enough. It’s a horrible sensation. His mouth feels like it’s stuffed with dry cotton and his legs _shake_ when he tries to get up (it has been six days since he last crouched on that rooftop), and he moves like a drunk.

He doesn’t so much walk to the door as he does stumble into it, sidelong. He reaches for lockpicks. It takes him several seconds to realize there are no lockpicks, that he’s unbalanced and tumbled to the floor, that there’s something like morphine or pure opium in his blood and there’s a _reason_ the walls are sliding sideways in his vision.

He wakes up again a few minutes later and drags himself back to the bed. Lies there. Waits for his head to stop pounding. Waits for things to settle. Quietly, he curses himself, Erin, Erin’s stupidity, that stupid _claw,_ whoever _put_ him here and whatever they’ve drugged him with, and himself again for good measure. There is a grate above the door, a window into the hall outside, and Garrett watches the bars over that grate double and triple and proliferate in his vision until the little room becomes a jailcell.

It’s another hour or another year before the shadow of a nurse appears in the keyhole.

“Oh,” she sighs, “good. You’re finally awake.”

*****

 _Patients are not to be addressed by name,_ warns a notice posted in the lobby, lest visitors start getting any ideas.

_A lack of self is conducive to the development of the new self._

_Erasure is part of the healing process._

_The soul is just an echo._

*****

The floor of the cell is white. The walls are white, the door is white, the uneven layers of paint on the metal bedframe are white. The clothes they have given him are white. Everything is white, or _supposed_ to be, and Garrett spends the afternoon watching the light shift around the tiny, tiny room and cataloguing all the shades of almost-white that light reveals. Grey and dun and dirty brown and stained yellow. There is nothing _clean_ in Moira, and this is why there is no healing; no one can start anew when even the air feels close and shuttered and dingy and stained _._

The air feels empty, too. He is used to the similar closeness and stains of the streets, but he’s not used to the air feeling _hollow,_ as if something has been ripped out of the world.

(Across the breezeway, patient #18 shrieks that this is _not where she’s supposed to be_ )

The clothes they have given him are white, or near enough, and the world here is _white,_ and there are few shadows for him to vanish into. They think they have trapped him. They think they have caught him. When the doctors and the nurses come to visit him in the evening, he does not answer their questions, and he rolls his eyes when their backs are turned.

“How did I get here?” he asks.

“You don’t remember?”

“If I remembered, would I be asking?”

Doctor Stedmann sighs, does not answer, refuses to answer any more questions Garrett asks him and jots a few notes on the chart. It does not particularly matter. Garrett will be gone, vanished, in a day or two or three. He always is.

At night, when the halls are quiet and the shadows are deeper, he works the kinks from his shoulders and hands, strips a few wires free from the springs of his bed and works the proper kinks into them, quietly picks the lock on the door. Closes it behind him. Hides in a supply closet while the Night Warden stomps by, throwing up lantern-light and ghoulish shadows on the walls, and tries not to laugh as the man walks right past him. He ducks from shadow to shadow to shadow. Steals a few things, harmless, a pair of spectacles and an inkwell and the kind of metal-nibbed pen patients are not permitted to have, solely so that he may gauge how the staff reacts in the morning and where and how the suspicion falls. He creeps forward through the ward until he hits an iron cage door with bars too narrow for him to slide through. Shrugs. Slinks his way back, shadow-shadow-shadow, carefully locks himself back in his cell before he can be missed, sits on the floor and stretches out and thinks.

The cage door opens from the outside; even if he had a key, he could not get past. This both is and isn’t an obstacle. This is expected. This is _simple._ He does not know why he is here, or _how_ he is here; there are gaps in the memory like worm-eaten holes in a book. But that is merely a wrinkle, unsettling as it is. Ultimately unimportant. He’s used to being caught in mad situations. The only thing _important_ is that what is caught can be freed, even if it takes him another night or two to properly case the place. He knows what the challenge is.

Garrett curls up like a cat at the foot of the bed and sleeps. Or tries to sleep. There is a tapping in the pipes of the building. In the walls around him. _Below._ It’s quiet enough that he finds himself breathing in synch with it before he even realizes it’s there. It’s steady. Mechanical. It sounds like a clock.

(Across the breezeway, before they can get another dose of morphine in her veins, patient #18 is screaming for him to _please wake up_ )

*****

 _We’ve admitted more than our fair share of architects, builders and unskilled construction workers,_ writes one of the doctors. It’s quiet for the moment, down in the lower Treatment wards. The screaming has stopped. _Their delusions all follow the same general patterns. If I have to listen to one more patient ranting that the City is built upon layers upon layers upon layers of itself, and that walking into a ruin is the same as walking into the dream of a former life, I might end up having to commit myself._

He walks past the rows off odd-shaped cells that were used, several years ago, in the Voclid Tests and the study of patients with abnormal perceptions of physical space. His shoes squeak on the floor. The sounds reflect oddly in the empty cells. Some are small as coffins, small as rowboats, small as grandfather clocks; some are as large as ships, stretching far back into the bedrock or the ruins of whatever this island used to be before the asylum took root.

The doctor has looked at the results of the study, briefly. He does not believe the claim that one of the patients, locked in the dark of a strange-shaped cell, managed to _displace_ himself and find himself fetal-curled in an alley half a mile away.

He especially does not believe the claim that the patient locked in the deepest cell managed to displace himself in _time._

*****

This is what Garrett discovers:

After three days of being corralled, herded, summoned by bells in the morning and locked in at night, he finds himself _twitching._ There is a chill in his stomach that does not go away. His hands do not stop moving. He finds himself tapping out the _click-click-click_ tattoo of the rapping in the pipes against his palms.

The Night Warden moves in unpredictable patterns. His lantern glows blue, and it _flickers_ so that the shadows before and behind him boil like smoke. He has hypersensitive hearing.

The locks on all the cell doors are simple. If Garrett wished to cause a mass liberation and a riot and a distraction, he could.

The windows are left open at night, and the air is cold and smells of clay and mold and distant sea-spray. The windows are very high up. If he had rope he could rappel down, but he has no rope, nor something to anchor it to, nor boat waiting at anchor to take him off this island.

They have kept his old clothes and old equipment; he has seen the logs. The exhaustive list of each and every one of his tools makes him look _absurd._ His things are stored in a corner of the basement that he has not yet been able to reach. The staff will dispose of them in a year.

They have also kept Erin’s.

*****

_Patient #18 is responding less well to sedation. Recommend upping her dosage._

_When awake, she is rarely lucid. When lucid, the curses she hurls at us are astonishing. Most of the time she simply shrieks for someone to ‘wake up,’ but we have not determined who this person is._

_(Do not recommend exposing her to patient #31 just yet. Despite her patron’s mumblings, I am not sure he would help in her current highly-agitated state)_

_I suggest recording some of her ranting. If we study it closely, I’m convinced we’ll see a pattern. Certain motifs repeat themselves over and over. She says she wants to go home but seems confused as to where ‘home’ is, and often talks about ruins upon ruins. Cobblestones. Fires and renovations. Crumbling cathedrals. Hammers and flowers. Eyes, or an eye. Ghosts. Eliza mentioned to me that when extremely upset, she has confused her verb tenses. Her patron is convinced or deluded that this is just a ‘reaction’ – to what? – that will heal itself in time, but I’m starting to wonder if she has anything left to be saved at all._

*****

Doctor Stedmann smiles, fondly, in a way that makes Garrett’s teeth _ache._ He lays the stolen spectacles, the stolen inkwell, and the stolen silver-nibbed pen on the table between them in a precise, neat row. Stolen, and newly-confiscated. “Why did you steal these?” he asks.

“Why am I here instead of at the end of a rope?”

The smile shows a bit more teeth. The doctor steeples his fingers and does not answer.

Garrett gives a very put-upon sigh. “We don’t have to do this.” Doctor Stedmann’s teeth are _far too white._ “Cute as it may sound, I’m not here for my health.”

“Of course you are.”

“ _Right._ Not that I’m not a fan of ticking off the Thief-Taker General, but why am I _here?_ Why’s Erin here?”

Doctor Stedmann’s eyes flicker in poorly-disguised interest; Garrett watches that flicker, catalogues it for future reference. “Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

“I steal because I’ve got to pay rent somehow,” says Garrett promptly, with a shrug and a hint of a smirk. Doctor Stedman badgers him, guilts, prods, insinuates, but that is the only answer he gives. _Because I’m good at it and I might as well. Because why not? Because I need to eat, and getting proper work sounds like work._ Another loose shrug, tapping out the beat of the tapping in the walls against his palm under the table. _Because it means I know how to steal myself out of this place._ It’s the only answer he _can_ give.

(This is what he learns: the doctors are not in a business of answering questions)

*****

 _The current Thief-Taker General has been annoyingly iron-handed. He hasn’t given us any subjects for rehabilitation in_ years _, much less for research. This could be a remarkable opportunity to study the criminal mind. Patient #31 is a healthy male of working age who is, to all outward appearances at least, sane. He should be perfectly capable of finding employment and contributing positively to society. What leads him to such deviant behavior? What drives him?_

_His current uncaring attitude is obviously a façade._

_(Huntfield bet me a drink that the root cause is neurological rather than cognitive. Huntfield continues to labor under the delusion that he is running a zoo, not a hospital)_

*****

The breezeway feels longer at night. It’s open, exposed, tricky to get across. Once on the other side, however, the Women’s Ward is a perfect mirror of the Men’s. Child’s play to navigate. It’s louder here. Someone is always humming in her cell. Someone is always weeping.

He takes a short running start, manages to clamber his way onto a cabinet, and from there he can pull himself up onto the cornice above the proper cell door.

Erin is in white, like him. She’s curled up tight. Her arm is in a sling. It’s been a fortnight since the accident, and the bruises that must have tattooed all over her skin are faded to yellow. He’s only surprised that whatever energy she landed on didn’t _burn_ her as well.

(Not that he can see)

He thinks she’s asleep. She’s not asleep. She _moves,_ catlike, eyes snapping open. They are bright and more _vibrant_ than he remembers. Her gaze snaps to the right side of his face and slides off.

“Erin?” he calls, quietly.

They have no more than two minutes before the Night Warden will wander this way, and Garrett can’t afford to spend that time searching for words. He’s never been good with words, and none of them feel like they fit. He can’t put together a sentence that encompasses _this is my fault with that stupid claw_ and _this is your own damn fault_ and _let’s call it a draw, alright?_ and _I’m breaking us both out_ and _are you okay, did you know there’s a loose grate in the women’s showers, no you know that’s not an innuendo, I’ll just need to get you a wrench, are you **okay?**_ He clears his throat. “You look like shit.”

“I _feel_ like _shit,”_ she mutters. Her gaze hits the side of his face again and tracks off. “Why aren’t you _awake?_ ”

“Erin – what? – hey, look at me –”

“Why aren’t you _awake?_ You’re not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be _here.”_ Her shoulders hitch and her face twists into something ugly and he finds himself edging away from the bars. The next thing she mutters is his name, high and _mocking,_ the word _Awakened_ sliding into _wake up -!_

And he is on the floor and running, soft thud of feet, soft _tap tap tap_ like clockwork ticking backwards in the walls in echo, because Erin is shrieking _wake up wake up wake up_ and it’s echoing all across the asylum and there’s a second _thud thud thud_ of feet, not soft, blue lantern-light like ghostlight on the walls and the breezeway is far too long and there is nowhere for him to _hide._ He is barely out of the Women’s Ward when the Night Warden’s club catches him in the side of the head. The world tilts. The world goes bright. The world goes black.

_Wake up. Wake up. Wake up._

*****

_Therapy is not punishment. A moment of pain can bestow a lifetime of well-being._

_A moment of confinement can bestow a lifetime of freedom._

_Electricity is the cure of the future, come to free us of the shadows of the past._

_Therapy is NOT punishment._

*****

“Why do you steal things?” the new doctor asks. This one has the beginnings of a limp. The sound of his feet is not steady at all.

Garrett _wants_ to smirk, but the restraints at his wrists and neck and forehead and ankles have wrung it out of him. There is something like frost in his veins. Not ice. Nerves, not fear. Not yet. It is only that they have bound him so _closely,_ that he’s exposed and under a light in the center of a bare empty room. There is no way for him to escape an no corner to hide in if he did. If they wished to _do_ something, break his fingers, dip his hands in oil, pluck out his eye, they _could._

They won’t.

They could.

He’s gotten out of worse binds before.

He’s not afraid. He’s not struggling. He’s not.

The new doctor does not seem to want an answer to his question, because he is not bothered when Garrett forgets to give one. “Unlike that idiot Stedmann upstairs,” he goes on, “ _I_ believe kleptomania is a pathological disorder of the brain. And brains can be reset. We’ve got a bet going, he and I; you could prove which one is right.”

The machinery under his fingertips hums and crackles. A switch flips.

A switch _flips._

And Garrett –                                                                           

*****

_Side-effects of electroshock therapy sometimes include headaches, muscle soreness, and confusion. Side effects often include both retrograde and anterograde amnesia._

Nurse Aubermill frowns at the medical handbook, dips her newly-returned silver-nibbed pen in ink, and adds _retrograde amnesia is probably a blessing._

*****

 _Places where people suffer **remember** , _someone has jotted down on one of the many, many notes on the walls that rustle like the leaves of a library of ghosts. _Even when we do not. Shalebridge remembered. Moira remembers._

*****

_Voclid Test record, patient #4, day 11:_

_Patient lucid yet totally incoherent. Speaks of unexplored spaces, all around him, given shape by some collective imagination and perpetually moving “as the City breathes.” At times, spoke of reality as the interlocking gears of a clock; at others, as a layer that shifts up and down. The clock metaphor is the most interesting, as the patient grew quite agitated when speaking of time and the City._

_According to his madness (as best as I can interpret) the City has always existed. The City will always exist. Thousands of voices overwrite and overlap each other. All events, all people, have always and will always simultaneously exist._

_Patient speaks of being deceived by the physical confines of his own skull._

*****

He _wakes up_ a day or three later.

In the interim, they’ve installed a new and better lock on his room. It’s not any more difficult to pick than the last one. He slips out the door, ducks out of the beam of the Night Warden’s lantern and scurries down the hall like a rat. He hides in his usual cabinet waiting for the man to pass and to plan his next step – but a second and then a third patrol later, he’s still there. Completely frozen. Unease (not fear) coiling up tight and sick in his stomach.

He can’t remember what comes next.

He finds himself flitting back to his room like a small white moth.

There is a great _whack_ taken out of the past day or three that smells of metal and ozone. Like fuse has burnt out. He’s not sure if he _can’t_ look at it or merely doesn’t want to.

As the days drag on and bleed into weeks, and the smell of ozone and _worse things_ downstairs in Reformation spatters through them like acid burns, the list of things he _doesn’t want to look at_ expands itself. It’s a month (of continually escaping but never quite _escaping)_ before he realizes he’s fallen into it.

The doctors insist that he is a man with a compulsive desire to steal _everything._ If they’re so insistent, he might as well humor them. If they’re so insistent they must be right.

*****

Doctor Stedmann sighs, stares at the report Huntfield has drawn up for him, and finally picks up a pen. _No,_ he writes. _Only occasionally. Change is not improvement. I found my wallet in #31’s room this morning, after all._

*****

There is a ticking in the pipes.

It’s in the walls, in the floor. It’s clearest down in Reformation, under the floor of the electroshock therapy room. Lightning is one of the few things that can scour something in Moira white and _clean._

He’s down there more often than he should be; the elevator runs on a regular schedule, and because everyone considers it security _enough_ and no one watches it closely and because it is old and there are _gaps_ it is easy, really, for him to hitch a ride crouched on the top. It is easy to travel the asylum unseen, like a ghost.

He feels like a ghost, lately. He feels like he’s been here before.

There are more shadows in Reformation than the upper wards. It’s easier for him to move. To see and not be seen. Above, in the white hallways of the general wards where the Night Warden stalks like an apparition and patient #18 refuses to look him in the eye, the ways to remind himself of _what he does_ are different. There is too much white, too much _light,_ so things that glitter and catch the light find their ways into his pockets. It happens without thought. He steals things (small things, worthless, a pair of spectacles and an inkwell and a silver-nibbed pen) not because he needs to but because they are there.

Because he has done all this before.

Because he _is._

This is not a challenge, though; the secrets of the upper wards are worthwhile, worth taking, but not _worthy._ He sneaks out of his cell and he flits from shadow to shadow to shadow and finds himself flitting _down,_ to the rooms where men were locked away in the dark or where electricity sings clean, following the ticking.

Someone has snuck down there before, he knows. Someone very much like him. Perhaps the same someone who left all the copper coins hidden in ledges and drains and corners, squirreled away, stolen and archived for no other reason than _because._

*****

_My visits to Moira are proving more and more fruitless and frustrating. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s impossible to get the Primal out of the girl. And I’m beginning to wonder if the current chill gloom in the air is somehow related. No one is sleeping well._

_The other thief doesn’t seem to have been touched by any of it. The staff reports he’s perfectly ordinary. I suppose we could have hung him._

Baron Northcrest throws the note into the fire.

*****

This is what he learns:

Nurse Aubermill does not secure the drawstrings of her purse, and will not notice if a few coins go missing.

The key to the Women’s Ward is kept in a drawer that is not locked. The cage door between the Men’s Ward and the lobby is in need of repair, and does not lock well.

Patient #82 howls when her ball is taken away.

Patient #63 is nearly as good with lockpicks as he, but when she sneaks out at night it is not to visit the Men’s Ward. The doctors are wrong: she wants _nothing_ to do with men. It is to get _away_ from Huntfield and his elevator that leads below.

 _Everyone_ wishes to get away from Huntfield and his elevator that leads below. Nothing there is something anyone wants to remember. He is not alone in this.

Patient #79 cannot sign her own name. When asked to, she draws the asylum.

None of the patients are allowed pens, or normally permitted to write, but patient #18 is allowed to draw with charcoal. The night after she is transferred downstairs, he looks through the keyhole of her cell and sees her drawings pinned to the wall. She draws flowers. She draws the claw, and hands with claws. She draws a city layered on top of a city on top of a city. She draws his own face, over and over and over; faces with no eyes; his own face with the eye gouged out, his own face with light spilling out of the eye, his own face with the eye turned bright and mechanical, his own eye looking back at him through the same keyhole. Blinking.

The next night, #18’s drawings are gone.

The stray charcoal smudges and fingerprints around their edges remain. They spread out all through the white walls of the asylum, staining, black.

*****

_Acceptance heralds recovery._

_Recovery is a journey which may have no clear end._

*****

This is what he discovers:

More copper coins, scattered across the grounds like little points of starlight in the dark.

A jeweled pin that a woman had dropped when they pulled her away from her raving husband.

Spoons hidden under loose tiles, and the foot-deep tunnel they’d begun to carve out in the plaster.

The cameo from a dead nurse’s throat.

A piece of twine that patient #22 had used to knot the amulet around his throat, before it became too precious for a mere string that could be cut.

Broken syringes.

Syringes that are whole, and used, and bloody.

This is what he discovers: all the secrets and precious things that Moira has kept hidden away, year after year. He unearths them. He takes them. He catalogues them because no one else will, because this is what he _does._ Because his fingers twitch. Because Moira needs someone to be its archivist, someone to Keep its forgotten things safe.

This is what he discovers, deep underneath even the shadows of Reformation: an eye. Brass and bronze. Mechanical. It is the exact size and shape and weight of a human one. The body is covered over with tiny runes that barely dent his fingertips. The iris is grey quartz, ringed with more bronze, tinged with green. The pupil is _black._ He squints. There are lenses upon lenses within, and if he looks into that depth he can see layers of gears upon gears. If he looks into that depth he reels. His eyes don’t want to focus. His right eye, in particular, burns in his head.

The gears are _whirring_ inside the eye, and some inner pendulum deep within ticks back and forth like a clock, and _this_ is the source of the echoing tap-ticking that has sounded through the halls and matched his breath and his heartbeat. But when he looks at the eye it does not look back. The lenses will not focus. It lies in his palm like a dead thing.

*****

_Voclid Test record, patient #7, day 13:_

_Patient claimed he could move through walls like parting a curtain. When I decided to humor him and asked how, he mumbled something about the City ‘knowing’ him._

_Patient #7 used to be almost sane. I formally request that we discontinue this crackpot experiment._

*****

“Why did you steal these?”

He looks up from the row of glittering confiscated trophies, looks at the doctor, and gives a loose shrug. There’s only one answer he can give, only one that is consistently true. “It’s what I do.”

*****

_Removing patient #18 to Reformation doesn’t seem to have quieted things. #22, in particular, is consistently agitated. Honestly, I strongly recommend keeping him gagged or otherwise silenced around the clock; we wouldn’t want the more lucid patients repeating anything he says to visitors, insanity aside._

_(Where the hell did he get the name ‘Orion,’ anyway?)_

_Patient #18 herself seems to be doing worse. Rants day and night about feeling ‘trapped’ or ‘used.’ I pity the poor thing. At least she’s no longer yelling for someone to wake up._

*****

Doctor Huntfield’s limp has become far more pronounced. His gait is unsteady. The sound of his bad leg is a _thud._

(Later, _much_ later, a thief hiding in the shadows of a foundry will hear a similar _thud_ of a similar over-heavy boot, and his body will go taut as a razor-wire)

He doesn’t visit Huntfield very often. This is a blessing. The worst part isn’t the blue-white electrical crackle, the smell of smoke, the great slices of time carved away so that he _wakes up_ curled up in his upper-level cell with the next day’s light on the walls and a freshly-installed lock upon the door. The worst part, still, is the restraints.

Being trapped.

Being _caught._

This time, patient #18 is being carted down the hall as the elevator shudders and sinks to a stop. She turns, yells, _reaches_ for him with a desperation that is horribly familiar. Her eyes are wild. For the first time in months her eyes are _clear._ “ _Garrett -!”_ she calls, “I’m -!”

And the rest is a blur, a cacophony of yelling and running orderlies and slamming doors, Huntfield ranting, the blue-white-spark _nothingness_ of electricity scouring the rest away in ugly, broad strokes. He does not remember being let up from the chair. He does not remember Huntfield lecturing him in terse, impatient tones about his stealing of things that have no _worth._ He does not remember the elevator-ride back up, the _snick_ of the lock in his cell.

But the name.

The name rattles through all of it.

When he wakes, it’s already night, and the shadows are deep and dark enough to vanish into. He’s curled up tight at the foot of his bed like a cat. The memory tumbles through his fingers like grains of sand.

_“I’m - !”_

_Slipping?_

_Trying to -?_

_Sorry?_

He sits up.

Carefully, slowly, because he needs to be quiet and because his body doesn’t fit together quite right after being shot through with electricity, he climbs on top of the table against the wall and reaches up. The mechanical eye nestles in the hollow of his palm. When he steps down and sits and opens his hand, it turns. Its pupil contracts with a living _whir._ It looks straight at him.

*****

_Confusion and clarity are often two sides of the same spinning coin._

_Only by blinding ourselves do we truly see._

*****

It has been nearly a year since the accident. The year is a blur. More than the year is a blur. His memory of the year is poorly spliced and sewn together with ragged and occasionally _missing_ stitches, but this is what he remembers and this is what he _knows:_

The Night Warden moves in unpredictable patterns, more like a wind than anything human, but he is only one man. He can be outthought. He can be outrun.

The locks on all the cell doors are simple. If he wished to cause a mass liberation and fan the flames of patient #22’s inevitable riot for a distraction, he could.

The windows are left open at night, and the air is cold and smells of clay and mold and distant sea-spray. The windows are very high up. If he had rope he could rappel down. He can find a rope, because they have kept his old clothes and equipment; he has seen the logs, after all. Patient #63 will have the wrench he needs to slip through the drainage vent in the women’s shower. He will find his old things that they have kept from him. They have not yet been destroyed. They have merely been in a part of the asylum that he has not had the inclination nor the selfishness to reach.

Patient #22 has been speaking of uprising and escape for weeks, and nurses have been leaving the island in droves as they complain of headaches and nightmares and stabbing pains in their fingers and eyes. There will be a boat at anchor. There will be a boat for him to steal and steal away in.

And Moira Asylum _remembers_ him.

It _knows_ him, and it does and has and will remember him (even if his throat closes up with ice at the idea of returning the favor), because even this wretched forsaken island is part of the City.

He has fallen out of the City for a week, or a year, or three hundred or ten _–_

He gets to his feet, and the night is dark enough to shadow him; and the eye in his hand falls to the ground and bounces and rolls away. It will tumble downwards and lodge itself in the roots of the building and go to sleep, again, to be eventually found by him. Or someone like him. Someone who needs _reminding_ , with the same name and same face and same gaze who moves the same way, whose breath falls in the same regular rhythm and whose shadow fits in his as precise as the interlocking gears of a clock. Someone very, very like him.

There’s no difference, really.

There is a plan taking shape. And he will find, as soon as he picks the lock on his cell and shuts the door carefully closed behind him, that he does not even _need_ the plan. He never truly does. He has always been a ghost in all of the rooms of the City and he can move through and between them as if they are nothing. He can pass through window and wall and door and time as if they do not exist. He always has. He always will.

Carefully, patient #31 listens at the door for the Warden’s footsteps. Carefully, methodically, he works the kinks from his fingers. Counts his lockpicks. Waits.

He’s spent a year (or ten, or full three hundred, or a week) filching forks and hairbrushes and pens because they were _there._ Plumbing and keeping the secrets of this awful place. It is time those secrets were buried. It is time he had a proper job with a proper, worthwhile target.

Garrett smiles at the dark.

It’s been a year.

It is time he stole himself back.


End file.
